The soldier who removed his own stone from the bladder and other wonders of the history of medicine

In his 2017 book on the history of cardiac surgery, the medical journalist Thomas Morris traveled hundreds of magazines of the 19th century. One day, a headline on the page opposite to the one he was reading caught his attention: "a sudden protrusion of the entire intestine in the scrotum". It was a bizarre case of the 1820s, involving a worker crushed by a cart loaded with bricks. The resultant hernia forced his intestines into his scrotum, but the worker fully recovered.

Once he had overcome his initial disgusted amusement, Morris was struck by the sheer ingenuity of the doctors in dealing with the state of the man. And he found many other bizarre cases in the pursuit of his research, as people survived truly horrible wounds – a testimony to the resistance of the human body. "Doctors, even when they had less than a tenth of the current knowledge of major trauma treatment, could still come up with innovative and ingenious solutions to acute problems," he said. .

Most of the most interesting medical cases discovered by Morris are in his extremely entertaining collection of medical curiosities, The mystery of the explosion of teeth and other curiosities of the history of medicine. Regular readers of his blog (slogan: "I am grateful for modern medicine") will love the stories of a sailor who swallows, a soldier who has removed his stone from the bladder, a man with flaring belching , a woman who rubbed her nose and a boy who inhaled the larynx of a bird and began honking like a goose. All are delivered in an elegant prose punctuated with the distinctive withered spirit of the author. Morris has gathered up to now about 500 such cases, which are often breathtaking, and only about 70 of them. So a suite (or two) is not out of the question

The case holder relates to many cases of people in the nineteenth century suffering from increasingly painful toothache, followed by a sudden crack resembling that of a pistol shot, while the tooth exploded, procuring instant relief. The burst was enough to almost spill a young woman, deafening her partially for several weeks.

Why did the teeth explode? Several theories have been proposed, such as dental caries leading to a build-up of gas that causes a tooth fracture, possibly because of chemicals used to perform early fillings. But there is no record of any of the patients whose teeth exploded having had fillings. The cause remains mysterious so far and no case has been reported in medical journals since the 1920s, according to Morris.

One of the most memorable cases that Morris has described concerns a 25-year-old man in San Francisco, badly wounded in 1858 when an old shotgun explodes under his hand, thrusting him a big ball of iron into Breast. Elias Samuel Cooper, a famous surgeon of this era, did not have access to modern technologies such as X-ray imaging to help locate the metal, which had housed just under the heart of the man.

Then he opened the rib cage and began to search. At first he did it without anesthesia, although when it was time to reach the thoracic cavity and remove the slug, Cooper happily gave some of it (probably ether). "The idea that a surgeon in 1858 would put his hand under the heart of a patient – I would have never seen anything like this for years of research on cardiac surgery," he said. Morris said.

"There is a surprising propensity for humans to do really stupid things like sticking foreign objects in their holes."

A whole section is devoted to the treatment of various objects stuck in the holes of people – like the 16th century monk who inserted a bottle of perfume in his rectum, presumably to "relieve the cholic", as claimed by the monk. "There is an astonishing constant propensity for the ability of humans, especially young men, to do really stupid things of sticking foreign objects into their holes," said Morris. "There are entire treatises on foreign bodies dating back to the 19th century and earlier, listing hundreds, if not thousands, of cases." Modern emergency rooms see this stuff on a regular basis. Human nature has not changed much in the centuries that followed.

Over the course of several decades in the 19th century, surgeons became increasingly daring about what they thought they could do for their patients, until several high-profile disasters prompted a series of ethical research aimed at balancing blood pressure. innovation with the needs of patients. . Among the most notable: a Chinese suffering from a severely engorged scrotum who opted for surgery, even though this state did not seem to put his life in danger. He spent hours in agony on the table, without anesthesia (and a room full of spectators), and finally died of shock and blood loss.

"This operation eventually resulted in an exchange of letters in professional journals," Morris said. "Some surgeons were absolutely nuts and felt that submitting this man to the operation was a terrible breach of duty."

Although the book contains a lot of humor and wit, Morris is adamant that he has never intended to make fun of the doctors practicing at this time. "I think it's too easy to laugh at the idea that they were using leeches or all those poisons [things like] The belladonna and the deadly nightshade, "he said. Everything a doctor did in 1780 was part of a system of thoughts that his teachers had taught him and pbaded on to his students. You are talking about people who did not understand one-tenth of our understanding of microbiology or the mechanisms of the disease. I think it's a mistake to judge historically without taking this context into account. "